Useless
on July 10, 2014 at 12:01 amChapter: The Big Sleep
Characters: Charles Walkerton, David Walkerton, Jason Chesterfield, Joyce Brown, Linda Walkerton, Mike Warner, Professor Doc, Sal Walters, Steve Walkerton, Tony McHenry
Location: Professor Doc's lab, SEMME Complex
Second page continues to set things up for us. We learn important things presented to us in Roomies! that we’d need to know going into It’s Walky! — Beef is Walky’s twin brother. Walky works at SEMME as lab help. He likes to stare at Joyce while she’s sleeping. Hrm.
Anyway. These two pages don’t correspond to the first few original strips at all. In fact, those original first five strips or so don’t correspond to any of the newer pages. They also don’t contradict them, so I’ll probably run them between today and the next “revised” page. They haven’t been on the Internet for nearly a decade, so they’ll be new to most of you!
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I dunno, Walky’s great for finding Nachitos!
uh
TBH I don’t know if I like these two pages–show vs. tell and all that–so it’s a good thing they’re extras.
Yeah, decent exposition if you want to put the stuff that’s in Roomies there and get it over with, but not the best method of expositing.
Er, Narrator, that’s a frisbee, not a football.
…Though it looks like Beef is trying to catch it like a football anyway?
It actually kinda looks like a tiny spaceship.
…
For all we know, the people who makes Frisbees are in cahoots with the aliens, so they could be both?
(I’ve only read bits and pieces of It’s Walky so I dunno how feasible that would be for headcanoning)
Is it just me, or do walky and beef not look related at all? I forgot that they were supposed to be twin brothers.
Nope, they don’t look related.
If you’ve haven’t read It’s Walky! before, consider that a huge spoiler warning!
You have evidently forgotten a lot.
“This is Walky. The fate of the world is in his hands. Unfortunately, he’s utterly useless. OR IS HE?!?”
For the longest time I thought SEMME was pronounced as “seam” and not “semi”.
I thought it was pronounced “Sim.”
HA! Glad, I’m not the only one who had trouble getting the joke!
I thought it was pronounced “Semm-AY”!
…There was a joke?
Sometimes it’s pronounced Semmf.
I always read it as Semm and some times Semm-ee.
It’s pronounced “EEEEEEE” [the S and Ms are silent]
Why is Professor Doc amoral? He always struck me as a pretty nice guy, except for the whole kidnapping children thing (and in this universe, who HASN’T done that?).
Well, he IS kind of a dick about everything. Not over the top about it, but a general continuous background noise of dickery.
To be fair, it’s ‘amoral’ and not ‘immoral.’ Not that there’s a huge distinction in what people mean using those words, but it is technically different.
Huh, went from Ruth to Dina. Uhhhh… -runs off to make a will-
Ah, Dina, always on the wrong side of a door.
yeah, it’s like the difference between being atheist and anti-Christian [which is also “same difference” to Christians]
IIRC He seems pretty amenable to doing unethical research on human subjects, although I can’t remember any particular examples at the moment.
Just click http://www.itswalky.com/character/professor-doc/ for his previous Roomies appearances and witness his general lack of empathy for Joyce or her family.
That first narration in panel 1 kinda contradicts something mentioned later on.
That was only when he was properly motivated to perform well, and only for a brief period. At the age they’re showing he still didn’t, most likely.
Walky’s GPA tends to vary depending on when it gets brought up. Billie says one thing later on, then it gets contradicted in J&W as part of an expanded backstory involving Dorothy.
Er, replace “contradicted” with “retconned”. The final revision didn’t really contradict previous statements so much as explained the contradiction of the two previous versions and make them both correct.
So, this bugs me, why didn’t Walky perform well in athletic things? He’s got all those nifty powers and, unlike everyone else, they’re natural due to his mother’s genetics so he shouldn’t be able to surpress them since they’d always be his natural default state.
Then again I never really understood how the Twins were special outside their affinity for Martian tech since it’s been stated their powers are just average. Or how Walky was supposedly the more dangerous of the two.
Born Martian was necessary for That Thing That Happened In The Final Battle. Tech reasons.
And I thought Sal was the more dangerous, Walky’s were in fact suppressed via other methods and it was a way to keep them under cover? But it’s been a while since I read it.
[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]
Because he was purposely holding himself back because when you succeed and overachieve people depend on you and he didn’t like being stuck with the responsibility
[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]
For the first few weeks, it’ll be easier just to go [NO SPOILERS HERE!] for the rare spoiler-free comments….. I plan on doing some fake spoilers, myself.
because who cares about sports and shit
Their powers are average
Both of the twins can take on Monkey Master. They’re the only ones who can. Monkey Master admits it himself in post-IW strips.
But how? Is it because the Cheese altered him specifically with Martian tech?
Nah, Sal beats him up before the upgrade. In fact, after the upgrade, Walky specifically can’t beat him like Sal could.
But if her powers are just average then how can she do it?
I’m sorry, there was supposed to be a question mark after average.
My point is that there powers are most certainly not average.
They are exceptionally talented abductees, and that’s what makes them soecial.
Might as well get the set-up questions out of the way: If SEMME doesn’t stand for anything, nor did the original SEMY, why did you change it?
SEMY? I wonder if the writers of “Skin Horse” read “It’s Walky!” back before that was changed- they have a character called UNITY. A dedicated puzzle-solving AI crashed while trying to figure out what the “Y” stood for.
SEMY never showed up in It’s Walky!, it’s from Willis’ pre-Roomies! non-canon stuff.
I assume SEMME just looks neater, really. Some how the mere presence of a Y just torpedo the organization’s credibility. Not sure why.
Also, panel 4 is really nice. I love the art from this period.
To confuse readers on how the hell it’s supposed to be pronounced.
Mr. Monkey has some messed up limb proportions in Panel 1.
(MASSIVE SPOILERS WITHIN)
Okay, so I’ve never thought about it too hard, but… Did Sal know she was adopted? I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable for Beef to never figure it out – it’s not unheard of for a mixed race kid to end up looking white. But the Walters were super white. I mean, Sal had to seriously be wondering what was up.
Beef isn’t white.
?!
…yes he is. Hell, he’s practically Aryan!
(I can’t say for sure since I don’t think we’ve ever seen his eyes)
Late in It’s Walky!, we see one of his eyes in close-up for one panel. They’re green. (I’d link it, but the page is massively spoily.)
“Likes to stare at Joyce in her sleep” and I immediately think of Shinji, ha. I still remember a poster with Walky, Joyce, and Rei all done up as those characters. Both were important in my life at the time, well at least the second half of Its Walky was some of the arc’s that happened after the underwater part got me right in the feels. Not sure if that’s a saying but I’m making it so.
I hate these pages. The art is great (not as good as your current work, but much better than the early “It’s Walky!”), but it’s a really clunky way of introducing the concept. I mean… yeah. This kind of exposition-heavy introduction is almost impossible to do well.
When I voted for the re-drawn strips, I thought we’d be diving right in with the stuff you previewed, not halting the narrative in its tracks for this.
SEMME had already been teased in “Roomies!” after all, and while I know from the commentary that you wrote these pages for a stand-alone book, I think diving right in would’ve been the better choice anyway. Leave these to the extras along with the original IW! strips and keep the plot going. Too late now, but it’s just frustrating finally getting to IW! and having the wheels start spinning in place instead of continuing toward the good stuff.
Walky has a twin brother? WHAT?!
This is blowing my ‘I have only read Dumbing of Age and Shortpacked’ mind!
Oh man, you’re in for a treat.
Here’s something for you then, Walky’s twin up there is one of the guys who harassed Danny after Dorothy dumped up when Amazi-Girl intervened.
In DoA, yes.
Amazi-Girl says she later tracked those thugs down and beat them to a pulp. Amazi-Girl defeated BEEF in combat. I… never stopped to think about that. Holy crap, that’s impressive.
You can watch her doing it if you watch the background strips during the party, though it’s easy to get distracted by more important events going on at the time.
She never actually went up against Beef. She smacked around his two nameless buddies, and Beef booked it along with them without actually engaging in fisticuffs. And Beef wasn’t even involved in the second encounter; his only appearance at the party was hanging with Roz.
Again, Amber mentions later that Amazi-Girl tracked them down and beat the snot out of them, so.
Yeah, as timemonkey says above, we saw her doing it. But, like I said, Beef wasn’t even involved in that second encounter. As you can see in the next strip, he was hanging with Roz while Amazi-Girl was kicking the others’ asses.
“We learn important things presented to us in Roomies! that we’d need to know going into It’s Walky! – Beef is Walky’s twin brother.”
Was it actually mentioned in Roomies!? I skimmed the strips with Walky and didn’t find it. And since I don’t think Beef was referred to as Walkerton at any point, how were we supposed to know that they’re brothers?
Now that you mention it, I went and skimmed the pages tagged for Steve Walkerton, David Walkerton, and Professor Doc. The closest thing to any mention of a relationship between Steve and David (Beef and Walky), far as I’ve seen, is the two silhouettes standing side-by-side in the background of Jason’s “I’m involved now” page. Never even noticed that until searching by the tags. I might’ve missed something, though.
Honestly, I don’t think we learned anything in Roomies that really matters after it.
Well, Joyce’s insane old crush on Danny defines her for a portion of IW!, and Sal’s “relationship” with Danny defines HER for MOST of IW!, and these two tidbits provide context for a big character development event for them both.
But don’t we flashback to Sal’s relationship with Danny DURING It’s Walky? So Roomies not needed there. And Joyce was mindwiped and barely reacts when she runs into Danny again so again, not necessary.
The whole reason for the Sal/Joyce confrontation in Roomies was to make a whole bunch of parallels for the Sal/Joyce confrontation in It’s Walky when the Aliens go public. It’s why they’re called, respectively, Round 1 and Round 2. I remember reading the archive the first time and not knowing WHY the second one was called Round 2, and indeed feeling like I was missing some context, since Round 1 was comic-books-only at that time.
“Walky works at SEMME as lab help. He likes to stare at Joyce while she’s sleeping.”
So Walky is Edward to Joyce’s Bella, that sure explains DoA Joyce’s love of the Twilight series.
Like Vancore, I’m thinking more Shinji to her Asuka.
WHY “SEMME”?? I mean, not only I can’t sort down what it means, but it looks like both “seme”, japanese for attackant in, for exemple, a basketball game, or to in gay intercourse AND “semen”, portuguese for “sperm”… Was it meant? Because I can’t look at that and not laugh…
Man, for a top secret organization, SEMME sure has some big-ass building signs.
They’re related????
…I think I was spoiled by someone saying that something should be considered a spoiler.
Originally posted:
December 26, 1999